


Atomic Dust

by ardett



Series: Platonic VLD Week 2017 [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Homesickness, Lance & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, Platonic VLD Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-26 09:36:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9883568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardett/pseuds/ardett
Summary: The paladins are millions of light years away from Earth, but light years can be measured in more than one way.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For [Platonic VLD Week](http://platonicvldweek.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Day One Prompt: Sunlight / ~~Moonlight~~

“Do you ever think about how…”

 

Pidge found Lance hidden away in an alcove of the ship. The castle was in orbit around a friendly planet to stock up on supplies. The other paladins had gone down to the planet’s surface with Allura and Coran. Pidge meant to follow, but they’d lost Rover somewhere along the way and they had traced the echo of metallic whirring down to this room.

That’s where they found both the robot and Lance.

Rover was flitting around Lance’s head, bumping into his shoulder and ruffling his hair. From down the hall, Pidge heard Lance’s giggling whisper of  _ okay, okay, cut it out, Rover! _ Still, Pidge had noticed the nervous flicker of Rover’s lights.

“What are you doing in here, Lance?” they had said. Lance tensed up, the smile falling off his face. Rover returned to Pidge’s side with a disappointed hum as Lance pushed them away.

“Nothing.” He was curled up against the curve of the window pane. This side of the spaceship wasn’t facing the planet, only space, space, and more space. Pidge glanced out the window to see if maybe they could see what Lance was seeing, but the bright glare of the closest star made them squint.

“You know, you shouldn’t look directly into the sun. You’re going to blind yourself.”

“Do you ever think about how…” Rover vibrates, digging into Pidge’s ribs like it wants them to pay attention. “...how this isn’t even our sun?” Lance’s hands clench. “I don’t even know how many millions of miles, millions of  _ light years, _ we are away from Earth. Away from Earth! I used to get worry about how many hours it would take to get back to my house and now we’re  _ light years _ away from basically everything! Every time I look out the window, I just think-” The desperation strips away from Lance’s tone, leaving behind some sort of loneliness. “We’re not even looking at the same stars as all those people on Earth. Like how in romance stuff they would be like,  _ we’re looking at the same moon, same stars _ , or whatever. We don’t even have that.”

Beyond the glass, the stars wink in and out of existence. A solar flare lights up Lance’s face and his eyes look too shiny to pass off as just a trick of the light. Sometimes Pidge thinks about how they used to be able to name the constellations. For a tick, they had entertained the idea of asking Allura or Coran to teach them some new ones before realizing they all travel too far, too often, for that even to be applicable. Sometimes, Pidge thinks about how a sheet of metal, a bit of heated glass, is all that’s separating them from the unforgiving, life-ending vacuum of space. Sometimes, Pidge also thinks about the sun.

“Hey, do you want to see the dinosaurs?”

“What?” Lance still doesn’t sound like Lance, but his eyes are on Pidge now, not focused on some point far too distant for either of them to see.

“I was thinking, because we’re millions light years away, the light is taking millions of years to get here. That’s how that works, you know.”

“Of course I know! That’s- that’s obviously-” Lance scoffs, but as soon as he meets Pidge’s eyes, he admits, “Okay, I don’t get it.”

“It means that if we look at Earth, we’re actually going to see Earth millions of years in the past.”

A smile grows on Lance’s face. “So dinosaurs?”

“So dinosaurs.” Pidge affirms. “Wanna go find a telescope with me?”

“Yeah!” Lance says eagerly, unfolding his miles of long legs.

As they walk out of the room, Lance begins chattering about how much he loved dinosaurs when he was a kid, and Rover trails happily behind them.

 

“This should be right.” Pidge turns smallest dial on the telescope a notch to the right, calibrating the last and most precise coordinates into the machine.

Lance leans up, putting his eye up against the magnifier. Stray bits of light refracted through unused lenses dance across his cheeks. For a moment, everything is still and quiet.

“...I don’t see anything.” Lance ends the silence loudly. “Definitely no dinosaurs. Are you sure you got the coordinates right?”

Pidge scowls. “You’re welcome to try and put them in yourself.”

“Ha, pass. But I’m just letting you know, there are definitely no dinosaurs.”

“Alright, let me look.” With a well placed shove, Lance falls to the side, though not without protest. Pidge drags over the stool they had been using when they adjusted the telescope’s settings and peek through the lense. They blink, squint, turn their head slightly to the side, and squint again.

“See anything? Pidge?”

“Lance.”

“Yeah?” Pidge hears Lance shuffles nervously.

They stare harder into the darkness. “How many light years away from Earth do you think we are? Do you think it’s more than 4.5 billion?”

“Maybe? I dunno, why?”

“I think the Earth might not have been formed yet.”

There’s a pause before Lance groans, “Are you serious?”

“I guess it’s possible that the dinosaurs engineered an invisibility shield that none of us knew about. But that’s pretty unlikely.”

“So no dinosaurs?” Pidge glances up to see dejection flash across Lance’s face. This was just a silly thing, they know that, but they also know that this tiny, little thing is more important than that.

Quickly, Pidge steals another look into the telescope, tilting their head the other way.

“Well, if you look at it from this angle, that group of stars kind of looks like a t-rex.”

Lance’s eyes light up with eagerness. Something in Pidge warms at the sight, despite the billions of light-years still between them and their sun.

“Really? Let me see!”

 

Sometimes, Pidge looks at Lance's sun kissed skin and understands why he misses it. Sometimes, Pidge thinks it’s silly that Lance misses the sun because after all, the sun is just a star and they see plenty of stars. (If you’re going to miss anything, miss the moon.) But mostly, Pidge thinks about vastness and closeness. 

The vastness of space surpasses  _ everything. _ Of course that makes sense, everything is collected sporadically in space, so of course space would have to be the largest thing. But still, Pidge can’t help but think about the  _ not thousands, not millions, but billions _ of light-years between them and Earth. It’s not a distance that measurable in meter sticks or playing fields or even Earths, like how they used to be told that 1.3 million Earths could fit in the Sun. It’s too great a vastness, too wide a divide. Their mind can’t even hold onto that number.

But the vastness is out there, beyond the walls of this spaceship. In here, there is warmth and laughter and humanity and physicality. In here, there is closeness. In here, there is Pidge and Lance, huddled over a telescope and pointing out made up constellations.

In here, there is no sun, but there is still light.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally had a line in here that was something along the lines of “the sun is just another star and we’re all made up of the same atomic dust.” The line went away but the title stuck.


End file.
